I use Dropbox so that clients can send me files. I do not use it for archival storage. Turns out this is a good thing.
From Jan Čurn writing at Petapixel:
A Cautionary Tale: How a Bug in Dropbox Permanently Deleted 8,000 of My Photos
I started using Dropbox back in 2009 and have always loved the service. Over time, I kept moving more and more files to my Dropbox folder and eventually had to upgrade to the Pro plan to keep up with the space requirements. In particular, I moved there all of my photos in order to be able to view/share them online and also to have them backed up.
In April of this year, a hard drive in my laptop was running low on space so I decided to use the Dropbox’s Selective Sync feature to unsync some large directories from the laptop. Because there was never any problem with the service and also because it’s already the year 2014, I thought it might be about time that one can trust a cloud-based storage service and use them as a sole backup of their files. Boy, I was wrong.
And the upshot:
About two months later when I was preparing for a defence of my PhD thesis, I was looking for an old presentation but couldn’t find it. The directory was there but it was empty. I would have never deleted these files, something must have gone wrong.
I contacted Dropbox support, who then broke the news to me: there was a delete event of 8343 files from 2014-04-29 at 14:57:30 GMT (UTC). Looking at the log record from this event, I realized most of the missing files were my photos! All the directories were still in place but many of them were empty, as if Dropbox randomly deleted some files and left some others intact. I was devastated. All those memories and the effort with collecting and organizing the photos… gone.
A bug in Dropbox and even for the Pro subscribers, they only retain data for 30 days. Not a good thing...
I use Acronis and create a local disk image every couple of days. Hard drive failure is not a case of if, it is a matter of when
